Well, it's been about 3 weeks now and I feel like I'm finally getting settled down with my new Mac mini, Gamork. There are quite a few things I like about my Mac mini, and I feel pretty good about the whole setup in general. The only thing I haven't gotten working yet is my printer (shared on a windows machine). Nonetheless my overall satisfaction with the system is very high, and I'm looking forward to adding a MacBook to my family of computers. Read on to hear more about my particular setup.

I really like Leopard. There was a bunch of stuff that I was thrilled to have right off the bat:

• Encrypted home directory: while this isn't strictly necessary, it's a very good feature, and one I'm happy to have because I need to be in good habits when it comes to data security.
• Spaces: this is something that was never implemented very well on XP (I think Vista has it though). In Linux I use virtual desktops all the time and generally to great effect. I currently have a 3x3 desktop on Gamork, but that may change over time.
• Terminal: I always like to have quick access to a terminal, and there just happens to be a very nice one built right into OS X. With the help of a cute little plugin called Visor I have hotkey access to a terminal at all times.
• The Dock: While it doesn't see a ton of use, it's still a very nice feature and with the right widgets can make things like Wikipedia articles even closer than ever.

So the current setup has Gamork on my desk right next to my XP gaming machine. I have two monitors, but one keyboard and mouse. The keyboard and mouse is shared using a program called Synergy. Its works great and is very responsive. For instant messaging I'm using Adium which is a very very nice application, and I've installed Colloquy for IRC. I am of course using Firefox for my web browsing purposes with quite a few extensions installed for added fun. iTunes is what I use for managing my music collection, but I use VLC for most of my on-the-fly media usage. For our halloween film festival I had to rip a number of DVDs which I did using Handbrake. There's lots of other programs that I've installed for general use, things like MacVim, Dropbox, Gmail Notifier, Truecrypt, Quicksilver, Audacity, Tomboy, OpenOffice.org, the list goes on. I see the importance of cross platform programming these days.

Overall I'm very happy, OS X is a much nicer desktop environment than Windows (and at least on par with Linux), I'm looking forward to using it more.